A variety of utility and specialty vehicles have been, and continue to be, used to accommodate the specific needs of various endeavors. Golf courses, airports, and factories are examples of enterprises that use special purpose vehicles to move goods and transport passengers from one place to another. The market for any particular model of this type of off-road vehicle is relatively small compared to the size of the market for vehicles used for highway transportation, agriculture, construction, and the like.
Specialty vehicles may be expensive to purchase. For example, the economies of scale available to the manufacturer of a popular family sedan are unavailable to the producer of a special-purpose motorized parts carrier used in an automobile assembly plant. Innovations that facilitate reconfiguration of a generalized utility vehicle from one purpose to another can provide competitive and operational advantages to both the manufacturer and end users.
Large industrial facilities such as grain mills, electrical generating power plants, manufacturing enterprises, golf courses, and college campuses all routinely dispatch maintenance, management, or production support personnel to geographically separated locations. Those personnel may also utilize helpers, supplies, production parts, repair parts, tools, and other items. Sometimes it is advantageous for a repair technician to travel to the site to evaluate what materials, assistance, and equipment will be needed to carry out the assigned tasks. Additional trips may be needed to assemble the needed crew and materials.
Golf course maintenance requires the delivery of landscaping materials, turf care products, tools, personnel, etc. to various locations. It can be a particular difficulty to quickly transport more than a single individual with the conventionally available course maintenance vehicles. Among the undesirable results of this situation are that: a single individual may be assigned to tasks that require much more time to accomplish than would be needed if carried out by a team; extra vehicles may be required to transport additional personnel to and from a work site; extra trips and disruption of scheduled activities may be required to convey personnel to and from a work site. The following example illustrates the problem: Suppose that a golf course manager needs to amend a bunker, replace some sod and prune several trees and shrubs at a remote location.
A landscape supervisor might, in this example, prefer to take the necessary personnel, supplies, and equipment to the site, see that the tasks are properly underway, and proceed to another location. Doing so is unlikely to be convenient because few load-carrying or traction vehicles carry passengers. For this reason, it is often necessary to provide each work crew of two individuals with an expensive utility vehicle which will (or should) remain idle while the work is underway. If the supervisor determines that the tasks might be most efficiently accomplished by a crew of three persons, the supervisor might travel to the site in a vehicle with one crew member while the other two individuals proceed in a separate vehicle that will remain with the crew. But when it is time to return, the ordinary utility vehicle cannot carry the whole crew of three, so it will be necessary to make two trips. In view of this, two crews of two, each with a vehicle, might be assigned to the tasks.
Providing two vehicles, neither of which is really needed, to carry out the work, may be so expensive that a facility operator may find it impractical. One or both work crews may need to walk to many work sites which reduces productivity and increases the likelihood that personnel may ride vehicles that are not designed for passengers. It would be advantageous to have a utility vehicle that could carry some tools and materials together with several additional passengers in this and similar instances. A supervisor could then take three workers, their tools, and necessary materials to the site. Once work was underway, the supervisor could go on to other things. At the proper time, a vehicle could be dispatched to return with the crew. Substantial cost savings result from reducing the number of specialty vehicles needed from three to one.
Earlier workers in the fields of passenger vehicle and cargo vehicle design have attempted to expand the range of purposes for which particular models may be used. Availability of optional configurations or features that allow a vehicle to fulfill additional needs beyond a primary one can greatly increase the functionality of a vehicle and enhance the value of the vehicle to the owner.
Some vehicles have features that allow passenger-carrying spaces to convert to a cargo-carrying mode. For example, it is an established practice to provide automobile seat backs that fold down to accommodate cargo that is too large to fit into the trunk. In a variation on that practice, Minka discloses" a Convertible Seat of a Vehicle that extends the trunk enclosure of a coupe or sedan into the passenger space by hinging the rear seat back at the top and rotating the bottom of the seat back forward to a horizontal orientation. The seat bottom is hinged at the front and the bottom of the seat rotated upwardly to a vertical orientation.
Station wagons may also be equipped with a rear seat that folds flat to make a load-carrying surface coplanar with the interior side of an open, horizontally-hinged, tailgate. A Fold-away Auxiliary Seat Unit for a Vehicle is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,482,346 for just such an apparatus.
Ferrara shows a Vehicle Seat in U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,417 which is suitable for fitting into sport-utility vehicles. It is adapted to have the seat back fold forward over the seat bottom so that the cushion portions of the back and bottom come into facing contact to bring the uncushioned side of the seat back coplanar with the load-contacting bed surface.
Evenrude shows a Convertible Golf Car in U.S. Pat. No. 3,471,071 that includes a seat with a complex linkage that allows the,car to transport golf bags, passengers, or cargo. The seat cushion is exposed at all times making it unsuited for hauling bulk materials, sod, tools, or machinery.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,125,284 Hicks et al. show a Vehicle with Convertible Step and Foot Rest. Unfortunately, their design precludes cushions for either the seat or the back. Passengers desiring to travel in the Hicks et al. vehicle would be seated directly onto the cargo-carrying surface which may make it difficult for passengers to keep their clothing clean.
Green's Retrofittable Passenger or Cargo Carrier for a Golf Cart is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,429,290. It is a conceptually different approach which places the additional passengers face-to-face on opposite sides of the vehicle. Many people find it uncomfortable to be seated in a position facing perpendicular to the direction of vehicle travel.
None of the utility vehicles known in the art satisfactorily provide both passenger-carrying and load-carrying capacity. Similarly, none of the vehicles provide a system that allows the conversion of passenger-carrying space to cargo-carrying space and back with sufficient quickness and ease to make it practical to do so several times during each day. None of the previously known convertible seat systems for utility vehicles shows a system that provides seat and back cushions that are protected from grime, dust, moisture, and loaded materials when the bed is in cargo-carrying mode and the seats are not in use.
What is needed, then, is a utility vehicle body convertible for carrying cargo or passengers that can carry cargo, including bulk material cargo, and be convertible for comfortably carrying passengers on seats that are uncontaminated by the materials previously hauled. Another need is for a utility vehicle that can be converted from cargo-carrying to passenger-carrying and back easily and quickly many times during a single day. Another long-felt need is for a utility vehicle that comfortably accommodates a driver and at least three additional passengers plus some tools, equipment, or materials.